[Music]
many years ago I grew up on a honey farm
in Western Canada and so every summer
and fall I’d be in the honey house
extracting honey from the honeycomb a
very sweet job and without fail a couple
of drops of honey would land on one of
the belts of one of the machines and
start to go squeak squeak squeak to
drive me nuts and just as inevitably a
cricket would walk into the honey house
and would go chirp chirp chirp what
always amazed me was that it didn’t take
very long before
what started as a sort of a random chirp
would synchronize with the squeak on the
belt why this was happening was a
question that lingered in my head for
very many years until I discovered the
principle of an Trainmen tin physics how
one rhythmic vibrating object will
synchronize with another and so I used
that idea and started creating music to
effect your brainwaves music like this
Pleasant music but that had a very
specific rhythmic structure that would
allow me to help you go to sleep help
you relax even help you focus
many years after I started doing this I
discovered that I could just use a
single pitch like this 40 Hertz remember
this sound very low it’s like low e on
the piano but with this I found I could
help people reduce their pain and even
reduce Alzheimer symptoms these three
sounds the cricket the music and the low
frequency pitch are all potentially
music medicine each of these sounds
features a rhythmic structure that
allows it to impact cells in your body
in fact my research recently has shown
that stimulating cells with sound of
this sort can reduce the risk and impact
of some common health problems this is
where you’re supposed to say wait what
and so there are two parts to this that
I need to unpack for you so you can
understand what I’m getting at the first
is how sound impacts cells in the body
sound which includes music but not all
sound as music but all music as sound is
in essence vibration molecular
compressions in the air that come to
your ear or to your skin if you feel it
as vibration as you may have done with a
40 Hertz the ear has hair cells in the
cochlea that translate this vibration
into electric signals so that the
auditory nerve carries this to the brain
so when you encounter a click like this
what’s happening is that compressions of
air air molecules are coming to your ear
and your ear is translating that into an
electric impulse and sending it to your
brain something like this so it goes up
the nerve and into the neuron except
it’s not just one you’re on it’s
probably a thousands or millions of
neurons that are responding right to
that click just a bit of information
here when we when we have one click
coming to our ear we call it one Hertz
as a measure per how many per second
when it’s five per second we call it
five Hertz when it’s 40 we call it 40
Hertz and the brainwave is measured in
the same way as Hertz so 40 per second
or 40 Hertz sound will be called gamma
because it’s in the category of gamma
brainwaves the other part of my
assertion is that brainwaves are
important to issues of health so let’s
look at that for a minute what we know
about the brain is that although there
are millions of neurons they’re not just
randomly firing unconnected what we know
is that neurons that fire together wire
together and so we have circuits within
our brain so for example the motor
circuit is multiple parts of the brain
that need to connect so that you can
initiate a movement so you can control
that movement and stop that movement the
memory circuit again connects multiple
parts of the brain so that what you’re
experiencing now you may actually be
able to remember tomorrow as the present
experience perception turns into
short-term memory and into long-term
memory what else we know about the brain
is that healthy circuits that are
functioning for you now require steady
brainwaves in other words if one part of
the brain is going like this and the
other part occasionally like that
they’re not going to connect the circuit
will not work and what we know is that
the frequency at which neurons like to
connect and respond most easily is
around 40 Hertz there seems to be a
pattern developing here
when circuits do not function correctly
bad things happen for example when the
parts of the brain that are supposed to
initiate and control movement do not
connect you may not be able to initiate
a movement as in dyskinesia or you may
not be able to stop as in a tremor so
you may have Parkinson’s when parts that
are supposed to give you a long term
memory do not connect you may have
dementia or Alzheimer’s so let me talk
about a case of Alzheimer’s that we
treated she had been diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s about 6 months before she
came to our experimental vibra acoustic
low frequency 40 Hertz treatment and so
we gave her a prescription of 30 minutes
of 40 Hertz sound stimulation three
times a week for four weeks and we used
this chair the next wave chair that had
speakers built into its six speakers so
that that low frequency 40 Hertz sound
you heard you would actually feel as
vibration at the end of the 12 weeks we
realized that her test score had gone up
she was giving us indication that she
could remember her grandchildren’s names
more easily she seemed more cognitively
engaged in clearer and so the question
is what is it about 40 Hertz stimulation
his vibration sound that might make this
happen why would this happen in the case
of Alzheimer’s so one of the things we
know about Alzheimer’s is that as a
person develops this there seem to be
fewer neurons firing together at the
forty Hertz level so there’s less power
and 40 Hertz that means the circuits are
decaying we also know of course that
sound stimulation increases 40 Hertz
firing and so we can increase their
number of neurons firing at 40 Hertz and
hopefully restore those circuits the
cricket principle so let me tell you
about a study we did next step which is
we took 18 patients this was just a
short little study to see whether we
could have some effect and we spread
these across mild to severe we used
watching a DVD as a control and their
prescription was 30 minutes of sound
stimulation in this chair at 40 Hertz
twice a week for only three weeks so a
total of three hours of stimulation and
the results surprised us what we saw was
not just in effect at every session
which is what we thought might happen
but this was accumulating session two
sessions over three weeks across the
sample we had an increase of 13% in the
test score we were getting results from
patients such as people saying in the
third week oh I remember doing this
before and generally greater engagement
with the world around them and
conversation so it’s a very strong
evidence that stimulation might in fact
improve notice the DVD had negative
effect they just got bored and got worse
watching the DVD so one of the questions
that came out of that study is how long
does this last like can we have this
effect for three weeks and then it goes
away what if a person continued this for
a while so this our first case after the
12 weeks they were quite happy with the
results and they wanted to continue it
although they were going south for the
winter and so I suggested they use this
device a portable consumer based device
that produces very good vibration at 40
Hertz and had onboard has onboard sound
that or music in fact the piece of music
that you heard in the middle of the
after the crickets that has a lot of low
frequency at 40 Hertz in it so she used
it for 30 minutes she’d have 10 minutes
of 40 Hertz sound stimulation I
suggested they use it every day I met
the couple three years later and my
first reaction was I really can’t tell
that this woman has Alzheimer’s and so I
asked whether they would come back into
the hospital to be reassessed and we
might be able to complete the case that
in fact the case was published just this
past July and so what we found when we
reviewed the case file and the testing
was that she had the exact same MMSE
this standardized Alzheimer’s score
three years later as she had had when
she was first diagnosed and so it gives
us great hope that potentially we can to
reduce the impact of the development of
Alzheimer’s we may be able to slow it
down even if we can’t cure it so we’re
planning another study now in which we
will do a much more intense look at the
mechanism here with Emmy G imaging of
the brain we will also look at amyloid
beta which is the plaques and tangles
because a study at MIT almost a year ago
showed that 40 Hertz light flicker in
the room 7
hours of just flickering 40 Hertz in the
room reduced amyloid-beta by more than
50%
and so we’re going to compare that with
the sound stimulation and probably we
expect that sound stimulation would also
reduce amyloid-beta and in that sense to
help to reverse the basis for
Alzheimer’s just for the record here are
some publications let me tell you next
about a case that came to us for
treatment with fibromyalgia she had been
diagnosed with fibromyalgia about six
years before with a severity scale of
about 17 out of 20 she had many of the
classic symptoms she had pain all over
her body as she used medication she had
real trouble sleeping she had was
depressed she had stiffness in her neck
and shoulders she couldn’t sit and stand
for very long at any one time she missed
many days at work so we gave her a
prescription of 23 minutes of 40 Hertz
sound stimulation two times a week for
five weeks on this device the next neuro
lounge that has two transducers in it in
what we found after five weeks was that
she had stopped using all her medication
she’s reported that she could sleep much
better she was less depressed the
chiropractor checked her neck and
shoulders and she had more mobility she
was missing fewer days of work and so
the question is why would 40 Hertz sound
stimulation have this result in
fibromyalgia that many doctors just say
oh it’s just all in your head it’s often
diagnosed as a psychological problem I
believe it’s all in your head or at
least a good portion of it is in your
head in terms of brain connectivity
because research shows that fibromyalgia
has connectivity issues between parts of
the brain and then the pain circuits so
the theory would be in our assumption
was the 40 Hertz sound stimulation would
restore this connectivity and she
demonstrated that there were positive
results so we then did a study with 19
patients completing in her open label
study the prescription was the same as
hers 23 minutes
two times a week for five weeks
publication and what we found is that
before the treatment started the
patients tended to cluster toward the
negative side of the scale the right of
the far right and at the end of the
study they clustered toward the positive
side of the scale what we found was that
a quarter had stopped all medication all
had reduced medication we were getting a
positive response on across the board so
we then went on to do much more rigorous
double-blind randomized control trial
Mount Sinai prescription here was forty
Hertz for 30 minutes a day five times a
week for five weeks thirty-eight
patients completing we used this same
sound Oasis device but with an mp3
plugging in the treatment track and what
we found at the end of that study was
that all we again saw a significant
reduction in fibromyalgia symptoms and
52% of the patients symptoms improved on
average by 40% so some had considerably
more improvement some had somewhat less
the next study which is already funded
will again use brain imaging and in this
case we’ll also do a blood draw to look
at the effect on gene expression
proteomics and on inflammatory markers I
can’t talk about all the exciting
applications one we’re just analyzing
now is with major depressive disorder
initially seeing some very good results
my colleagues at Laurier University have
done some good studies with Parkinson’s
my colleague at University of Toronto
has even shown that vibration can
increase bone cell density one of them
that I’m excited about and just starting
is with blood flow dr. arkady yuri ash
in miami has done some pioneering work
on this and has developed a device that
you can attach to the rest or to the
chest and so we’re using sound that i’ve
created in a study at an LA to reduce
the impact of stroke with sound
stimulation we’re just working on a
proposal to reduce the risk of heart
failure in this next video i’m you’re
going to show you briefly how quickly
this effect happens so at the start of
this
we’ve got the cellphone type device
attached that size to this person’s risk
the wrist the blue indicates normal
blood flow level and once the device
gets turned on you will see very quickly
that the yellow and the red will
increase as blood flow starts to
increase in this in this hand so this is
an area of research that we’re just
starting to do intensively and I think
has real promise for some very serious
cardiac and blood flow treatments fifty
five years ago I was working sticky and
and sweet by listening to crickets in
the honey house and I could never have
foreseen that the questions I was asking
about crickets and belts might turn into
music medicine I could not have foreseen
that the idea of that came from this
cricket could start to create sound that
might impact cells in your body that
stimulating cells with sound can reduce
the risk and impact of health problems
like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and
fibromyalgia and depression but what I
do foresee now in the not-too-distant
future is that when a doctor encounters
something like Alzheimer’s or
Parkinson’s or depression they might
take out their prescription pads and
write a prescription for sound
stimulation and that’s music medicine at
the cellular level
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
many years ago I grew up on a honey farm
in Western Canada and so every summer
and fall I’d be in the honey house
extracting honey from the honeycomb a
very sweet job and without fail a couple
of drops of honey would land on one of
the belts of one of the machines and
start to go squeak squeak squeak to
drive me nuts and just as inevitably a
cricket would walk into the honey house
and would go chirp chirp chirp what
always amazed me was that it didn’t take
very long before
what started as a sort of a random chirp
would synchronize with the squeak on the
belt why this was happening was a
question that lingered in my head for
very many years until I discovered the
principle of an Trainmen tin physics how
one rhythmic vibrating object will
synchronize with another and so I used
that idea and started creating music to
effect your brainwaves music like this
Pleasant music but that had a very
specific rhythmic structure that would
allow me to help you go to sleep help
you relax even help you focus
many years after I started doing this I
discovered that I could just use a
single pitch like this 40 Hertz remember
this sound very low it’s like low e on
the piano but with this I found I could
help people reduce their pain and even
reduce Alzheimer symptoms these three
sounds the cricket the music and the low
frequency pitch are all potentially
music medicine each of these sounds
features a rhythmic structure that
allows it to impact cells in your body
in fact my research recently has shown
that stimulating cells with sound of
this sort can reduce the risk and impact
of some common health problems this is
where you’re supposed to say wait what
and so there are two parts to this that
I need to unpack for you so you can
understand what I’m getting at the first
is how sound impacts cells in the body
sound which includes music but not all
sound as music but all music as sound is
in essence vibration molecular
compressions in the air that come to
your ear or to your skin if you feel it
as vibration as you may have done with a
40 Hertz the ear has hair cells in the
cochlea that translate this vibration
into electric signals so that the
auditory nerve carries this to the brain
so when you encounter a click like this
what’s happening is that compressions of
air air molecules are coming to your ear
and your ear is translating that into an
electric impulse and sending it to your
brain something like this so it goes up
the nerve and into the neuron except
it’s not just one you’re on it’s
probably a thousands or millions of
neurons that are responding right to
that click just a bit of information
here when we when we have one click
coming to our ear we call it one Hertz
as a measure per how many per second
when it’s five per second we call it
five Hertz when it’s 40 we call it 40
Hertz and the brainwave is measured in
the same way as Hertz so 40 per second
or 40 Hertz sound will be called gamma
because it’s in the category of gamma
brainwaves the other part of my
assertion is that brainwaves are
important to issues of health so let’s
look at that for a minute what we know
about the brain is that although there
are millions of neurons they’re not just
randomly firing unconnected what we know
is that neurons that fire together wire
together and so we have circuits within
our brain so for example the motor
circuit is multiple parts of the brain
that need to connect so that you can
initiate a movement so you can control
that movement and stop that movement the
memory circuit again connects multiple
parts of the brain so that what you’re
experiencing now you may actually be
able to remember tomorrow as the present
experience perception turns into
short-term memory and into long-term
memory what else we know about the brain
is that healthy circuits that are
functioning for you now require steady
brainwaves in other words if one part of
the brain is going like this and the
other part occasionally like that
they’re not going to connect the circuit
will not work and what we know is that
the frequency at which neurons like to
connect and respond most easily is
around 40 Hertz there seems to be a
pattern developing here
when circuits do not function correctly
bad things happen for example when the
parts of the brain that are supposed to
initiate and control movement do not
connect you may not be able to initiate
a movement as in dyskinesia or you may
not be able to stop as in a tremor so
you may have Parkinson’s when parts that
are supposed to give you a long term
memory do not connect you may have
dementia or Alzheimer’s so let me talk
about a case of Alzheimer’s that we
treated she had been diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s about 6 months before she
came to our experimental vibra acoustic
low frequency 40 Hertz treatment and so
we gave her a prescription of 30 minutes
of 40 Hertz sound stimulation three
times a week for four weeks and we used
this chair the next wave chair that had
speakers built into its six speakers so
that that low frequency 40 Hertz sound
you heard you would actually feel as
vibration at the end of the 12 weeks we
realized that her test score had gone up
she was giving us indication that she
could remember her grandchildren’s names
more easily she seemed more cognitively
engaged in clearer and so the question
is what is it about 40 Hertz stimulation
his vibration sound that might make this
happen why would this happen in the case
of Alzheimer’s so one of the things we
know about Alzheimer’s is that as a
person develops this there seem to be
fewer neurons firing together at the
forty Hertz level so there’s less power
and 40 Hertz that means the circuits are
decaying we also know of course that
sound stimulation increases 40 Hertz
firing and so we can increase their
number of neurons firing at 40 Hertz and
hopefully restore those circuits the
cricket principle so let me tell you
about a study we did next step which is
we took 18 patients this was just a
short little study to see whether we
could have some effect and we spread
these across mild to severe we used
watching a DVD as a control and their
prescription was 30 minutes of sound
stimulation in this chair at 40 Hertz
twice a week for only three weeks so a
total of three hours of stimulation and
the results surprised us what we saw was
not just in effect at every session
which is what we thought might happen
but this was accumulating session two
sessions over three weeks across the
sample we had an increase of 13% in the
test score we were getting results from
patients such as people saying in the
third week oh I remember doing this
before and generally greater engagement
with the world around them and
conversation so it’s a very strong
evidence that stimulation might in fact
improve notice the DVD had negative
effect they just got bored and got worse
watching the DVD so one of the questions
that came out of that study is how long
does this last like can we have this
effect for three weeks and then it goes
away what if a person continued this for
a while so this our first case after the
12 weeks they were quite happy with the
results and they wanted to continue it
although they were going south for the
winter and so I suggested they use this
device a portable consumer based device
that produces very good vibration at 40
Hertz and had onboard has onboard sound
that or music in fact the piece of music
that you heard in the middle of the
after the crickets that has a lot of low
frequency at 40 Hertz in it so she used
it for 30 minutes she’d have 10 minutes
of 40 Hertz sound stimulation I
suggested they use it every day I met
the couple three years later and my
first reaction was I really can’t tell
that this woman has Alzheimer’s and so I
asked whether they would come back into
the hospital to be reassessed and we
might be able to complete the case that
in fact the case was published just this
past July and so what we found when we
reviewed the case file and the testing
was that she had the exact same MMSE
this standardized Alzheimer’s score
three years later as she had had when
she was first diagnosed and so it gives
us great hope that potentially we can to
reduce the impact of the development of
Alzheimer’s we may be able to slow it
down even if we can’t cure it so we’re
planning another study now in which we
will do a much more intense look at the
mechanism here with Emmy G imaging of
the brain we will also look at amyloid
beta which is the plaques and tangles
because a study at MIT almost a year ago
showed that 40 Hertz light flicker in
the room 7
hours of just flickering 40 Hertz in the
room reduced amyloid-beta by more than
50%
and so we’re going to compare that with
the sound stimulation and probably we
expect that sound stimulation would also
reduce amyloid-beta and in that sense to
help to reverse the basis for
Alzheimer’s just for the record here are
some publications let me tell you next
about a case that came to us for
treatment with fibromyalgia she had been
diagnosed with fibromyalgia about six
years before with a severity scale of
about 17 out of 20 she had many of the
classic symptoms she had pain all over
her body as she used medication she had
real trouble sleeping she had was
depressed she had stiffness in her neck
and shoulders she couldn’t sit and stand
for very long at any one time she missed
many days at work so we gave her a
prescription of 23 minutes of 40 Hertz
sound stimulation two times a week for
five weeks on this device the next neuro
lounge that has two transducers in it in
what we found after five weeks was that
she had stopped using all her medication
she’s reported that she could sleep much
better she was less depressed the
chiropractor checked her neck and
shoulders and she had more mobility she
was missing fewer days of work and so
the question is why would 40 Hertz sound
stimulation have this result in
fibromyalgia that many doctors just say
oh it’s just all in your head it’s often
diagnosed as a psychological problem I
believe it’s all in your head or at
least a good portion of it is in your
head in terms of brain connectivity
because research shows that fibromyalgia
has connectivity issues between parts of
the brain and then the pain circuits so
the theory would be in our assumption
was the 40 Hertz sound stimulation would
restore this connectivity and she
demonstrated that there were positive
results so we then did a study with 19
patients completing in her open label
study the prescription was the same as
hers 23 minutes
two times a week for five weeks
publication and what we found is that
before the treatment started the
patients tended to cluster toward the
negative side of the scale the right of
the far right and at the end of the
study they clustered toward the positive
side of the scale what we found was that
a quarter had stopped all medication all
had reduced medication we were getting a
positive response on across the board so
we then went on to do much more rigorous
double-blind randomized control trial
Mount Sinai prescription here was forty
Hertz for 30 minutes a day five times a
week for five weeks thirty-eight
patients completing we used this same
sound Oasis device but with an mp3
plugging in the treatment track and what
we found at the end of that study was
that all we again saw a significant
reduction in fibromyalgia symptoms and
52% of the patients symptoms improved on
average by 40% so some had considerably
more improvement some had somewhat less
the next study which is already funded
will again use brain imaging and in this
case we’ll also do a blood draw to look
at the effect on gene expression
proteomics and on inflammatory markers I
can’t talk about all the exciting
applications one we’re just analyzing
now is with major depressive disorder
initially seeing some very good results
my colleagues at Laurier University have
done some good studies with Parkinson’s
my colleague at University of Toronto
has even shown that vibration can
increase bone cell density one of them
that I’m excited about and just starting
is with blood flow dr. arkady yuri ash
in miami has done some pioneering work
on this and has developed a device that
you can attach to the rest or to the
chest and so we’re using sound that i’ve
created in a study at an LA to reduce
the impact of stroke with sound
stimulation we’re just working on a
proposal to reduce the risk of heart
failure in this next video i’m you’re
going to show you briefly how quickly
this effect happens so at the start of
this
we’ve got the cellphone type device
attached that size to this person’s risk
the wrist the blue indicates normal
blood flow level and once the device
gets turned on you will see very quickly
that the yellow and the red will
increase as blood flow starts to
increase in this in this hand so this is
an area of research that we’re just
starting to do intensively and I think
has real promise for some very serious
cardiac and blood flow treatments fifty
five years ago I was working sticky and
and sweet by listening to crickets in
the honey house and I could never have
foreseen that the questions I was asking
about crickets and belts might turn into
music medicine I could not have foreseen
that the idea of that came from this
cricket could start to create sound that
might impact cells in your body that
stimulating cells with sound can reduce
the risk and impact of health problems
like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and
fibromyalgia and depression but what I
do foresee now in the not-too-distant
future is that when a doctor encounters
something like Alzheimer’s or
Parkinson’s or depression they might
take out their prescription pads and
write a prescription for sound
stimulation and that’s music medicine at
the cellular level
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
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